Foreign funds for farms, fishponds fan faith PHL can pull through pandemic

SOME Filipinos have been found with a blood type of “H”: Hero. Two groups of Filipinos don’t know they have it. But with hard work and a shared love for their families and the motherland, they’re able to carry the economy now clambering from a rut.

The first group wires money from over-200 countries and territories, as migrant workers, permanent residents, naturalized citizens and many more. They had been hailed “heroic” by a former Philippine president. Decades after, and with more than $400 billion of cash sent home over a 45-year period, these Filipinos push commerce, lift consumer spending and attract investment amid a recession.

But the second group of heroes—agricultural workers—surprised mainstream development analysts. The agricultural sector became the Philippines’s saving grace during a pandemic.

Agriculture and international migration are strange bedfellows for economic growth in previous decades. The former is associated with rural poverty, one of the causes for overseas employment. The latter forms the foundation of food security, one of the motivations for raising cash through work overseas. Migrant workers experience some affluence, one of the causes for luring the younger generation away from seasonally-earning farming and fishing.

Webinar, meet-up

OVERSEAS Filipinos and overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) want business ventures leading to immediate, more gainful profits—like their overseas earnings. But with an infectious disease stalling growth in the services and manufacturing sectors, agriculture became a bright spot of Philippine growth last year.

The government remains steadfast that the agriculture sector last year was resilient despite a full-year 1.2 percent contraction in production due to supply disruptions caused by the African swine fever, the Taal volcano eruption and typhoons.

No less than President Duterte lauded the efforts of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in averting a possible “pila-pila” for food supply during the height of the pandemic.

Policy makers now want overseas Filipinos and the more than 400,000 repatriated last year, to band with agriculture and harvest gainful incomes in aid of the green buck. Loan facilities have been rolled out. Encouragements to invest in agriculture have flooded cyberspace through webinars and online meet-ups with compatriots abroad.

The pressures of reintegrating repatriated migrant workers pushed the agricultural sector to provide entrepreneurial opportunities. Rural areas house these farm and fishing harvests. And some economists think mobility restrictions may have turned into a blessing for agricultural entrepreneurs to collar their internal markets and provide them with food.

Expand markets

IN lands of green fertilized by monetary harvests from across seas, agriculture and overseas remittances may provide a new normal for making Filipinos’ international migration work for rural development. Philippine agriculture may find migration a shot in the arm if farming and fishing families use foreign remittances to buy farm inputs, farming technologies and fisheries equipment.

Thus, economist Alvin P. Ang of the Ateneo de Manila University thinks localized farm ventures within the rural origins of Filipinos abroad may reap dividends for them during this pandemic. Localized farm ventures may not require much capital and logistical expenses. These ventures will “solve local food requirements and contribute to local food security,” Ang added.

That’s because neighbors and town-mates became the instant target markets. While restrictions have eased, previous lockdowns choked rural-to-urban agri-value chains. Surplus farming produce then got wasted.

If local farming ventures want to dare expand markets to Covid-stricken cities, for example, let excess produce from local production handle them, Ang said.

This localized approach may help would-be-OFW and non-OFW farm entrepreneurs to collar rural hometown markets, Ang said.

“And when there is excess produce from local production, then farmers can sell outside,” he added.

Laid off, suit

FILIPINO farmlands frequently get hit by typhoons. Damaged crops are staple fare.

For Filipinos abroad and their families, the global contagion the coronavirus caused had swept years of bountiful harvests. Alternatives had to be made.

Gina Pomida-Delgado had to make a choice: her husband is stuck in Italy.

Her husband was laid off from the hotel where he worked for 21 years. A labor suit followed, but Delgado’s husband and fellow Filipino hotel workers must continue to make ends meet.

Back in Borongan City, Eastern Samar province, Delgado was quick to the draw. This daughter of farmers had been running a  palay  farm since 2015. The venture then became the Delgados’ economic safety net as her husband was unable to wire euros home.

Good thing our earnings from  palay  “are more than half of what we (are earning) in our other businesses,” Delgado said.

Chances of imports

AS early as 2015, when Gina decided to reunite with children Loanes and Diego and permanently settle in Borongan City, the Delgados spread their financial risks and diversified their income sources. Previous and current overseas earnings and savings (including her husband’s) and profits from farming and non-farming businesses did the trick.

Delgado’s husband, along with more than 165,000 Filipinos, remain in Italy, amid 2,475,372 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of January 26, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. The future of their source of income remains uncertain in the short term.

That uncertainty could be dispelled by venturing into agricultural production, Scalabrini Migration Center (SMC) Director Maruja Asis has said in an online seminar.

And if the Filipino abroad and the family in rural Philippines invested in farming and fishing prior to the pandemic, agriculture may well be their “best investment,” according to rural finance practitioner Marvi dela Cruz.

“It is more profitable to engage in agricultural ventures now,” according to Dela Cruz, who heads the Tarlac Provincial Cooperatives and Enterprise Development Office.

“There are still limited chances of importing food from neighboring countries that are also experiencing this pandemic.”

Offering loans

YEARS of advocacy efforts—by the DA and by some migrant civil society groups—to link dollar remittances with agriculture suddenly became a major policy effort last year.

In May last year, Agriculture Secretary William D. Dar pronounced that the government would be offering interest-free loans to overseas Filipinos that would invest in the farm sector. Dar’s sales pitch? Filipinos abroad are “the new breed of ‘agri-preneurs’ who will help revive and reboot the countryside,” Dar said.

“Now is the time to tap the overseas Filipinos sector as they start to reintegrate themselves back to their respective homes, communities, and provinces,” the DA chief said at a time when OFs lost jobs and their remittance expected to plummet significantly this year.

Dar directed his agency’s rural finance arm, the Agricultural Credit Policy Council (ACPC), to offer agricultural credit facilities for repatriated (and some current) overseas Filipinos. With the continued droves of repatriated migrant workers, the ACPC had to direct a specific credit window for them.

ACPC Communications Head Emmalyn J. Guinto prodded OFWs to avail themselves of three loan facilities: the expanded “Sure Aid and Recovery” (Sure) for Covid-19 project; the “Kapital  Access for Young Agripreneurs” (Kaya) loan program; and, the “Agri-Negosyo” (Anyo) loan program. The ACPC acts as the wholesaler while partner rural banks, government financial institutions (GFIs), non-GFIs and co-operatives retail these loans at “affordable” interest rates.

Micro, small

ACPC’s Anyo lending program is for micro-scale and small-scale agricultural enterprises and sole proprietors who are registered in the farmers’ databases of local agricultural offices at provincial, city and municipal levels. The Anyo is the loan facility that specifically prioritized repatriated overseas workers.

The ACPC said its Anyo loans will be for activities in the food supply chain. These activities include production, processing and distribution, as well as purchase of farm and fishery equipment and acquiring fixed assets.

Micro-scale farm enterprises run by eligible repatriated OFWs can borrow up to P300,000. Small-scale farm ventures by these same clients can borrow a minimum of P300,000 and a maximum of P15 million. Both of these loans carry zero interest and are payable in five years.

The ACPC said the Sure project provides “working capital loans” for agri-fishery micro-scale and small-scale enterprises (MSEs) “to continue operations and ensure the availability of food supply amid the enhanced community quarantine” measures implemented last March to May and, to this day, under general community quarantine.

https://businessmirror.com.ph/2021/01/28/foreign-funds-for-farms-fishponds-fan-faith-phl-can-pull-through-pandemic/